Hi GH, I DO use it, can't swear to its effectiveness, but I like to think it helps. I don't use hort. grade tho', I just use any old charcoal bits, like aquarium grade from the pet store. Seems to work fine for me, I think of it as anti-rot or anti-mildew or anti-too much moisture. When I make up my mixes, I toss in abt a level teaspoon per lb. of soil. I water root a lot of stuff too, esp. Hoyas, so I sprinkle a bit in the rooting water,'cause I never change it, only add to it (rooting water is said to have hormones in it that help rooting plants, so I leave it). The addition of the charcoal bits keeps the water from getting yucky (like that technical term??) & from growing algae. Lately I've taken to rooting Euph. milii varieties in water as well (who would have believed that), works really well if you take the lower leaves off, so I sprinkle some charcoal in that water too. These have been rooting in 7-10 days, last 2 batches. So, all told, I'd say try it -- it sure can't hurt anything!

I bought 4 of these last spring end of summer time frame and they all dropped their leaves as soon as I watered them one time - mine were all small ones in 2 inch pots I thought they were dead but then read more about them and re-potted them in 4 inch pots then set them aside and forgot about them until I noticed a little green spot on top of one of them and then boom green everywhere some times a couple of inches in a day - mine are under grow light in the bedroom and I wonder how do they know its time to grow as they havent had natural light or change in temps

I knew in my heart I should have just used the gritty mix. I've read about people killing their plants in it because they're not used to working with it. They have trouble deciding when to water again. I don't blame them for being confused, the top gritty mix was dry the next day. I feel like i would be watering the plant every 5 days in it and it might be too much. The fix for not knowing when to water is easy. Use a "tell". More about that below. Also, if the gritty mix you're using is screened correctly, you should be able to water things in it before the plant actually needs water with no harm - within reason. You can't water a plant that wants to be dry all winter and not expect problems, but the gritty mix I use is so forgiving I can water what succulents I grow on pretty much the same schedule (that's the dreaded SCHEDULE that plants should never be watered on). I've been watering on a schedule with the gritty mix for more than 20 years with no losses to root rot or vascular wilt diseases. Many people with a lot of healthy plants recommend cactus potting mix with regular potting mix 50/50. Does that work better than adding gritty mix to potting mix? I've seen people do half cactus mix to half pumice or perlite. I felt like what I was doing was similar. I saw one man on youtube surrounded by plants re-pot his sans in 1 part peat, 1 part perlite, 1 part sand. I feel like sand can cause impaction but I've read these plants grow in desert climates naturally. I felt like I saw/read so many different ways to pot a plant. For every 10,000 hobby growers, there are probably 1 or 2 that know what they're talking about. Most of the others find something that works better than what they were using previosly and losing plants. and stick with it. Mixing regular potting mix with cactus potting mix is a crap shoot because what's on the label says nothing about what's in the bag. You can be sure though that that mix will will have very close to the very same physical properties of the lesser (harder to grow in) of the 2 soils. You cannot increase aeration or drainage appreciably by mixing together water retentive ingredients. It also makes no sense to mix anything fine into the gritty mix. You can start with a quart of gritty mix, add a cup of peat or potting soil to it, and you end up with a poorly aerated mix you won't appreciate. You shouldn't think in terms of half and half of any ingredients if one of those ingredients is fine (peat, coir, compost, sand, ...) In most cases the fine component of a mix will be peat. The most common coarse component is pine bark. the peat should be from 10 to no more than 20% of the mix. If it's more than that, ALL the spaces between the park particles get filled with peat and your mix will have lower o/a porosity than growing in peat only, and that would make a poor soil indeed. How water behaves where plants naturally occur is so vastly different than how it behaves in pots, it would only very rarely make sense to even consider replicating the soil a given plant is growing in in situ. If growing in the ground is a 1, and hydroponics is !), growing in pots is a 7 or 8. different worlds - different rules. Soils in pots are all about structure. I think when it was in peat I waited too long to water (about every 3-4 weeks) it because when I gently removed it from the pot half of the roots fell away, like they were too dry. Please pardon my inexperience. Should I change it so the gritty mix is also on the bottom? I'm afraid to touch it because the roots seemed so delicate. When I ran out of my mixture during re-potting I was wishing I put the 1 1/2 of gritty mix at the bottom. I have read about the PWT. I wasn't sure if that situation would create that and rot the roots so I left it alone. Perhaps what I did was worse. It sounds like your inferring my mixture is unusable? That's a subjective matter. I can say that I wouldn't use it, simply because I can very easily use a basic 5:1:1 or gritty mix, and by adding an extra handful of this or that, customize it for any plant. IOW, I can increase or decrease water retention over a wide range without sacrificing drainage or aeration. In most cases, if the grower tries to increase water retention, it's done by increasing the amount of perched water a soil holds, and perched water IS the limiting factor where excess water retention is in play. Should I pull it out, put a layer of gritty mix on the bottom and then some on the top (don't touch the root ball)? Are we still talking about the Sans? Forgive me. I worled outdoors all day and I'm at the point where it's hard to focus. If you're repotting the sans, I think you could repot directly into the BJ Gritty unless it wasn't screened. If it wasn't screened, you could use a slightly LARGER pot with ballast at the bottom.A link to More About Ballast. Here's the stuff about using a "Tell": Using a 'tell' Over-watering saps vitality and is one of the most common plant assassins, so learning to avoid it is worth the small effort. Plants make and store their own energy source – photosynthate - (sugar/glucose). Functioning roots need energy to drive their metabolic processes, and in order to get it, they use oxygen to burn (oxidize) their food. From this, we can see that terrestrial plants need air (oxygen) in the soil to drive root function. Many off-the-shelf soils hold too much water and not enough air to support good root health, which is a prerequisite to a healthy plant. Watering in small sips leads to a build-up of dissolved solids (salts) in the soil, which limits a plant's ability to absorb water – so watering in sips simply moves us to the other horn of a dilemma. It creates another problem that requires resolution. Better, would be to simply adopt a soil that drains well enough to allow watering to beyond the saturation point, so we're flushing the soil of accumulating dissolved solids whenever we water; this, w/o the plant being forced to pay a tax in the form of reduced vitality, due to prolong periods of soil saturation. Sometimes, though, that's not a course we can immediately steer, which makes controlling how often we water a very important factor. In many cases, we can judge whether or not a planting needs watering by hefting the pot. This is especially true if the pot is made from light material, like plastic, but doesn't work (as) well when the pot is made from heavier material, like clay, or when the size/weight of the pot precludes grabbing it with one hand to judge its weight and gauge the need for water. Fingers stuck an inch or two into the soil work ok for shallow pots, but not for deep pots. Deep pots might have 3 or more inches of soil that feels totally dry, while the lower several inches of the soil is 100% saturated. Obviously, the lack of oxygen in the root zone situation can wreak havoc with root health and cause the loss of a very notable measure of your plant's potential. Inexpensive watering meters don't even measure moisture levels, they measure electrical conductivity. Clean the tip and insert it into a cup of distilled water and witness the fact it reads 'DRY'. One of the most reliable methods of checking a planting's need for water is using a 'tell'. You can use a bamboo skewer in a pinch, but a wooden dowel rod of about 5/16” (75-85mm) would work better. They usually come 48” (120cm) long and can usually be cut in half and serve as a pair. Sharpen all 4 ends in a pencil sharpener and slightly blunt the tip so it's about the diameter of the head on a straight pin. Push the wooden tell deep into the soil. Don't worry, it won't harm the root system. If the plant is quite root-bound, you might need to try several places until you find one where you can push it all the way to the pot's bottom. Leave it a few seconds, then withdraw it and inspect the tip for moisture. For most plantings, withhold water until the tell comes out dry or nearly so. If you see signs of wilting, adjust the interval between waterings so drought stress isn't a recurring issue. Al

I noticed these little bubbles this afternoon on my Jasmine. So far, these plants are isolated because I thought they might have had powdery mildew (they did not) but now I'm glad because I'm worried this is scale. If not scale, what the hell is it? I bought six rooted cuttings of CJ, and split them between two biggish pots. Funnily enough, this is happening on specifically one plant per pot. Secondly, I'm noticing some new growth looking distinctly lime green or yellow-green. I'm not sure if it's calcium deficiency or if it needs fertilizer, but I recently have fertilized it with half-strength Miracle Grow indoor plants fertilizer. I'm just not sure if I used enough. Or too much. The yellowing is happening to one or two plants per pot (but different plants than the ones I'm worried about re: scale). I also think I may need to change the soil mix for these pots, because it's somehow getting pretty compacted despite it being very fresh soil (I've used a chopstick to try to aerate the soil and decompact it a bit). I used miracle grow indoor potting mix and added perlite and peat moss. I know CJ likes to be pretty moist but not like, too wet so I don't water often, but water deeply when I do and use my water meters to check dryness near the roots. I got them in mid July and have only watered twice since, but the soil just will not dry out. Any tips on what mix of soil you'd use would be appreciated as well. I have perlite, vermiculite, peat, horticultural charcoal, some coarse sand, pumice, African Violet mix, and miracle grow indoor potting mix at my disposal. Thanks for any advice!! Also apologies for formatting, my phone does not seem to want to play nice. Pictures of the issue: http://imgur.com/gallery/12Kd7lw http://imgur.com/gallery/Xz27rKx